My answer to the question
is yes. A powerful and
reciprocal relationship between
thrift and generosity can exist, and
has existed at key moments in our
past.

Beginning with Benjamin Franklin,
the great popularizer of thrift, we
can trace the development of thrift
as a complement and spur to
generosity in American thought and
practice.

The high point of this
development came in the early
decades of the twentieth century
when a mass culture of thrift
provided the rationale and resources
for a culture of organized mass
philanthropy. To be sure, the
practice of thrift has not been
consistent across the centuries.
Americans have often been
notoriously unthrifty. But the
broad tendency over time has been to
tie thrift and generosity together
in a new and expansive view of
giving.

Over much of the world,
the practice of giving freely and
sacrificially of one’s time, talent
and treasure has been rooted in the
religious obligation to offer tithes
to one’s own faith community and to
give charity to the poor and needy.

Franklin broke with this
tradition. He recast the
philosophy of giving from a
religious obligation to care for the
poor to a secular rationale for
doing good while doing well.
Central to his thinking was the
connection between thrift as a means
to individual betterment and
generosity as a means to social
betterment.

[Comment:
Franklin was friendly to "religion",
often supporting evangelists, but at
the same time drifting into a
secular understanding of things.
He could identify and work with
the "good", that which promotes
life and relationship, but he could
not, without God, deal with
"obligation". He was very
strong morally (except when he
wanted to flirt), but he was
divorcing his morality from God, the
fatal step into which the West was
heading, deontologising morality,
separating it from its
metaphysical foundations,
i.e., from God, leading to
positivist law.]

Franklin saw thrift as
way to wealth for “middling” people
who were not born to great riches
but who could gain wealth through
persistent hard work and frugal
living [the
rising middle
class
- E. Fox].
However, his notion of thrift was
never narrowly conceived as
wealth-building for its own sake or
for the sake of one’s heirs, much
less for the establishment of a
permanent class of wealth and
privilege. Indeed, in
Franklin’s view, riches passed on to
future generations only bred
idleness and dissipation.
Those who gained wealth, he
believed, had the responsibility to
give their time and talents to serve
the public and the common good.

At the same time,
Franklin was opposed to traditional
charity. Instead, he argued,
one’s gifts should be directed
toward projects of self-help and
mutual aid. He believed that
generosity, like thrift itself,
should produce growth. Its
beneficiaries should multiply.
Funds should be replenished and made
available to others. Putting
this idea into practice, he
bequeathed a substantial fund to
provide loans for young married
tradesmen who pledged to repay the
loan at five percent of the
principal each year.

Franklin also rejected
the notion of generosity as painful
self-sacrifice. He believed
that giving brought rewards to the
giver as well as the receiver.
As Poor Richard said, “When you are
good to others, you are best to
yourself.”

If Franklin laid the
philosophical foundations for
thrift-based generosity, the great
nineteenth century philanthropists
put the idea into practice.
Industrial magnates like Andrew
Carnegie, John D Rockefeller, Johns
Hopkins, Leland Stanford, Charles
Pratt and John C. Wanamaker used
their immense fortunes to build
universities, hospitals, public
libraries, museums, and vocational
training schools. Importantly, the
institutions they founded were for
the social benefit of the public and
not for their own private pleasures.
With the founding of these
educational and cultural
institutions, they expanded and
enriched the civil society and the
common good. [This
pleasant view of those persons above is only
partly true. Some of these
folks were scheming to turn America
into a plutocracy - rule of the rich
- part of it through the
Federal Reserve,
control of the banking system, etc.,
-- forerunners of the current "globalist"
conspiracy. E. Fox]

A 'Gospel
of Wealth,' A Culture of Thrift

To a remarkable degree,
these philanthropists echoed
Franklin’s philosophy of giving.
Like Franklin, most came from
humble beginnings and credited
youthful habits of thrift for their
rise into great wealth. Like
Franklin, they saw their wealth as a
trust to be used for the benefit of
improving opportunities for aspiring
Americans. In his famous 1889
essay, "The Gospel of Wealth,"
Andrew Carnegie restated Franklin’s
principles of philanthropic giving.
In it, he argued that a person of
wealth should live modestly; provide
moderately for those who depend on
him; and use the surplus as trust
funds to produce “the most
beneficial results for the
community.” He also underscored
another hallmark of Franklin’s
thinking: namely, that the aim of
giving should be to “place within
reach the ladders on which the
aspiring can rise . . . “

The close relationship
between thrift and generosity
reached its high water mark in the
early twentieth century with
emergence of an organized and
institutionalized culture of thrift.
National organizations like the
YMCA, National Education
Association, American Bankers
Association, and the General
Federation of Women’s Clubs
mobilized to celebrate Thrift Week,
to encourage thrift education for
schoolchildren, and to promote the
habit of savings among urban workers
and new immigrants who might
otherwise turn to loan sharks and
salary lenders for financial help.
Building and loans, mutual savings
banks, and later credit unions
offered cooperative savings
opportunities for wage-earning
Americans as a ladder to economic
betterment. Related QuestionsCan Virtuous Habits Be
Cultivated?Which Beliefs Contribute to
Virtuous Behavior?

The national thrift
culture not only encouraged personal
savings. It provided the
impetus for a culture of mass
giving, or what the historian
Olivier Zunz, echoing thrift
advocates of the time, has termed
“public thrift.”

Public thrift rested on
the principle of self-interest
rightly understood. As
Americans faced public health
threats or natural disasters, they
realized that they could not protect
their families from such
catastrophes on their own. But
they could pool their nickels and
dimes to wage a collective fight to
search for a cure. In short,
their small savings could have big
effects on the entire society.
Their time and talents could be
pooled to provide volunteer armies
of fundraisers to fight tuberculosis
or to support the Red Cross.

Thus, mass savings and
mass giving had a reciprocally
reinforcing effect on the public.
Thrift leaders promoted popular
giving, and philanthropic leaders
praised the popular habit of saving.
Economists devised family budgets
that included a line item for
household giving, thus establishing
generosity as an economic norm for
families of all income levels. In
this fashion, thrift provided the
resources for giving, and giving
inspired greater thrift as the two
were increasingly linked in popular
health, and later, World War I
fund-raising campaigns.

The reciprocal
relationship between private and
public thrift, saving and giving,
persisted into the early years of
the Great Depression and later
helped to drive popular
participation in the hugely
successful World War II savings bond
campaigns and the post-war March of
Dimes effort.

Giving in
an Age of Spending

By the 1960s, however,
the coalition of national
organizations promoting thrift
ceased their activities.
Schools gave up their savings
programs. And
American households increasingly
turned to consumer debt rather than
savings to finance their wants and
needs.
[Fox emphasis.] The savings rate,
which stood in double digits as late
as the early 1980s, fell to near
zero in 2005 and has since rebounded
to a still anemic 4.4 percent.

As a consequence, thrift
has lost much of its cultural force.
Few schoolchildren today have even
heard the word, much less are able
to say what it means. A
teacher of my acquaintance reports
that her students, rich, poor and
in-between, customarily throw their
loose change into the trash along
with their lunch leftovers.
Apparently, they are clueless as to
the value of their nickels and dimes
when their customary medium of
exchange is the “swipe” card.

Yet the relationship
between thrift and giving has not
died out. It persists in the
philanthropic work of men like
Warren Buffet and the late Sir John Templeton
who exemplify the tradition of
living modestly and giving
generously of their wealth for the
betterment of the larger community.
And public thrift – in the form of
mass giving campaigns - continues to
be a part of American life and
culture. Indeed, Americans are
famously generous in their response
to natural and health disasters,
both here and across the world. We
continue to join walk-a-thons and
fundraisers to combat breast cancer,
diabetes, Alzheimer’s and other
diseases. We continue to volunteer
time to help others in need.

Still, it may be too
optimistic to expect generosity to
flourish as its cultural and
economic wellsprings run dry.
Indeed, public thrift may not be
sustainable without the renewal of
the value of private thrift.

In light of that
possibility, I invite readers to
offer their thoughts and comments on
the following questions, (or on any
other relevant point one might wish
to raise).

Likewise, widespread
prosperity in the past has helped to
foster generosity. Will
Americans become less generous and
less oriented to public thrift in
these difficult economic times?

A mass thrift culture
fostered collective action in
service of a common goal. What
kinds of social and institutional
incentives today would generate a
similar spirit of cooperation for
the common good?

Finally, what can we do
to help young people learn about and
practice thrift, given their use of
new technologies that foster speed,
instant gratification, and the magic
of plastic over the magic of
compound interest?